Case Study
Rebuilding DreamHost's Email Product Suite
Professional Email & Google Workspace (DreamHost)
Project Overview
Project
Professional Email & Google Workspace (DreamHost)
Type
Self-Service Plan Management + Account Flow Redesign
Role
Product Designer — end-to-end: business case, flows, UI, cross-functional alignment
Timeline
Multi-sprint (Planning → Build), FY26
Scope
Change Plan flow · Marketing page refresh · Universal checkout · Google Workspace account & user creation flows
Deliverables
Business case & SWOT · Scenario systems · Checkout UI · Marketing page · Flow diagrams · Measurement framework
Status
Approved — in Build. Professional Email Change Plan flow complete; marketing page & checkout in review. Google Workspace Release 1 nearly complete; Release 2 in development. Mobile deferred by design.
Target Success Criteria
This project has not yet shipped — these are the metrics it was scoped against, not realized results.
Framing success before build was deliberate: each metric maps to a distinct business lever.
−5%
Support Replies
Mail-related tickets reduced — self-service cuts inbound volume
+2%
Plan Upgrades
Stepper + live pricing creates an organic upsell path
+100%
Traffic Shift
To the new page once the legacy page is retired
Overview
Paid Email had quietly fallen behind the rest of DreamHost's account experience. While Web Hosting, VPS, and Dedicated servers had all migrated into a unified management panel, Paid Email remained stranded on an isolated legacy page — offering zero visibility into usage or billing. Meanwhile, the Google Workspace signup flow suffered from a parallel issue: a tangled creation process, a lack of fraud controls, and an architecture that sat entirely outside the standard checkout experience.
As Lead Product Designer, I drove this initiative end-to-end — from the business case and user flows to final UI — across three connected efforts: a Paid Email Overhaul, designing the Change Plan scenario system, refreshing the marketing page to match DreamHost's modern in-panel standards, and delivering Manage Email Phase 2; and a Google Workspace Integration, rebuilding the marketing experience and streamlining the user creation flow from the ground up.
Problem Statement
Two of DreamHost's email products were falling behind—each for a different reason, but both blocking the same goal: giving customers full visibility and control from one trusted place.
Neither team had a single source of truth for plan states or permissions before building
As a result, both products fell further behind the rest of DreamHost's account experience — and every downstream surface, from checkout to marketing copy, inherited that inconsistency.
Research
Paid Email was the last major service still living outside DreamHost's unified Manage Account experience. Competitors bundling hosting and email — Hostinger, Namecheap, Fastmail, Zoho Mail, IONOS — all provide unified dashboards, which made the isolated Paid Email page read as outdated by comparison. Survey data added a twist: existing customers were indifferent to inbox size, which killed the "generous inbox" storage-led positioning before design began.
Four projects, one system
Told as four separate efforts — Change Plan, the new marketing page, the Google Workspace flow rebuild, and Annual Plans — because each shipped (or is shipping) as its own scoped piece of work. They’re grouped here because they share a root cause and a throughline: decisions made early got reused, not redesigned, as the product grew.
Research Questions
Do customers actually want more storage, or better management of what they have?
Why is Paid Email still living outside Manage Account when every sibling service has migrated?
What's driving repeat support tickets around mailbox usage and billing?
What plan behavior has to exist before any page can honestly sell it?
“Customers weren't asking for more email features — they were asking to manage the ones they had without leaving the panel they already trust.”
Insights & Problems
Insights & Problems
Four gaps that surfaced once the research was in — the foundation all three parts of this work had to solve for.
01
A fragmented account experience
Paid Email management lived outside Manage Account while every other major service had migrated. Customers context-switched to a separate, older interface just to manage mailboxes.
IMPACT — Inconsistent journey that undercuts consolidation work already shipped
Invisible usage data
No clear visibility into mailbox usage or storage consumption — a recurring driver of support tickets.
IMPACT — Customer uncertainty and avoidable support load
An outdated marketing page
A thin, legacy template with no pricing module, while every newer product page had moved to the modern componentized format.
IMPACT — Professional Email reads as a legacy product next to its own siblings
Messaging and pricing that couldn't flex
Pricing had to reflect real product logic — free-trial, promo, and standard eligibility, plus mailbox limits by hosting plan — none of which the old page or checkout handled.
IMPACT — A pricing story that didn't match the actual product model
These four gaps became the foundation for every decision that followed — from the Change Plan system to the new marketing page.
Journey & System Design
Four separate efforts, one connected system. Rather than treating Change Plan, the marketing page, Google Workspace, and Annual Plans as isolated fixes, each was designed to reinforce the others.
The reframe
How might we bring two lagging email products into DreamHost’s modern, consolidated account experience — without treating either as a simple visual refresh, and without designing anything twice?
Change Plan
(defines the rules)
Marketing Page
(communicates them)
Checkout
Applies them
Annual Plans
(extends the rules to a new model)
Running in parallel: the same consolidation principle — self-service, transparent billing, no legacy holdouts — applied to Google Workspace's account and user creation flow.
PART 1
Change Plan — Paid Email
With the isolation problem and competitive gap already established in Research, the first project tackled the rules Paid Email needed before any surface could change: how upgrades, trials, and edge cases should actually behave.
Strengths
- •Proven patterns from prior Manage Account migrations
- •Existing designs to build on — lower dev overhead
- •Organizational momentum behind consolidation
Weaknesses
- •Legacy page has entrenched user habits
- •Paid Email plan structures introduce new edge cases
Opportunities
- •Stepper + billing preview → organic upsell path
- •Moves DreamHost closer to retiring legacy pages
- •Self-service reduces support cost at scale
Threats
- •A poorly communicated transition risks short-term confusion for customers used to the old page
Designing the rules before the surface
Before a marketing page could sell the plan, the plan’s behavior had to be designed — exhaustively. The Change Plan scenario system covers upgrading with existing mailboxes, upgrading on a free trial, upgrading after a promo expires, lower-bound input errors, exceeding the mailbox limit, full add-on usage, and cancellation.
Before → After
Before
Legacy flow: clicking ‘Manage’ redirected customers to a disconnected external email management page, fragmenting the account experience and obscuring plan/billing details.
After
Unified in-panel experience featuring self-serve plan modifications and transparent usage metrics. Shown here handling an unhappy path: a customer at their five-mailbox limit upgrading directly within Manage Account with clear billing rules applied.
What the redesign fixed
Customers hitting their mailbox limit had no way to see why, what it would cost to fix, or whether the price they’d been quoted still applied. The redesigned flow surfaces storage usage against plan limits, shows the real billing outcome, and lets customers upgrade from the same page instead of opening a support ticket
The same system handles free-trial, promo, and standard eligibility — each surfacing different messaging and pricing from the same underlying rules.
PART 2
Professional Email: the new marketing page and Manage
The in-panel Professional Email marketing page needed to catch up to DreamHost's modern in-panel product pages. The old page used a thin, legacy template — a simple hero with a checklist, three feature blocks, a Gmail cross-sell, and an FAQ — with no real pricing module and none of the structure or componentry of newer pages.
This was a full overhaul: new layout, modern components, refreshed messaging — taking the structure from modern product templates, then mimicking the Google Workspace refresh styling and the panel design system, so Professional Email reads as a sibling rather than a legacy holdout.
Product model the page had to reflect
- Professional Email is an add-on mailbox model — a plan "includes" a number of mailboxes (e.g. "your mail plan includes 5 mailboxes"), and users add or remove paid mailboxes from there
- Pricing is driven by mailbox count
- There's a free trial and a separate promotional rate; plans renew automatically until canceled, and users aren't charged during the trial/promo window
With those rules already locked by the Change Plan flow in Part 1, the marketing page could finally be rebuilt to match the rest of the panel — same structure as DreamHost's modern in-panel product pages, same visual language as the in-build Google Workspace refresh — so Professional Email reads as a sibling rather than a legacy holdout.
Before → After
Before — Old Professional Email marketing page (legacy thin template)
After — New Professional Email marketing page + checkout
PART 3
Google Workspace: rebuilding the account and user creation flow
Google Workspace's signup flow had grown fragile: account creation and user creation were combined into a single flow, built on one of DreamHost's earliest microservices, and the whole thing sat outside the standard cart and checkout process.
What the new flow had to accomplish
- Split account creation and user creation into two separate flows
- Limit how many users a customer can create, to prevent fraud
- Bring Google Workspace back into the standard cart and checkout flow, which it had drifted outside of
- Introduce pre-billing, so Workspace can be offered at signup instead of after
- Remove the free trial from current flex plans
- Fix and update the legacy Google Workspace microservice to our current standards
- Set the groundwork for annual plans, to be introduced in the following project
Scoped to Flex, built to extend
This project focused exclusively on DreamHost's current Flex plans. Annual plans were intentionally left out of scope — a known next step, not an oversight — so the account creation flow was designed to accommodate that expansion later without requiring another rebuild.
Handling errors without exposing Google's API
Customers should never see a raw Google API error. Every failure state — quota limits, invalid domains, misconfigured access — gets caught internally and replaced with a plain-language message, while the underlying error is logged for the team to investigate.
Before → After
Before — Legacy Google Workspace add-on page
After — New Google Workspace flow (in design)
The Solution
Across three connected efforts, I drove this initiative end-to-end — from business case and user flows to final UI. For Paid Email, I designed the Change Plan scenario system, refreshed the marketing page to match DreamHost's in-panel design standards, and delivered Manage Email Phase 2 — giving the product a home inside the account experience for the first time. For Google Workspace, I rebuilt the account and user creation flow from the ground up, closing the fraud-control gaps and disconnected checkout that had made signup fragile. The new flow requires a paid plan and account creation before any users can be added — removing the ability to provision users ahead of payment, which was the core gap being exploited.
Both efforts were designed around the same underlying problem: neither product had a single source of truth for plan state or permissions, and every downstream surface — from checkout to marketing copy — had inherited that inconsistency.
Target Impact
This project is still in build, so these aren't realized results — they're the outcomes it was scoped to hit, each mapped to a specific business lever: a 5% reduction in support replies (self-service cuts inbound volume from mail-related tickets), a 2% increase in plan upgrades (the new stepper and live pricing create an organic upsell path), and a 100% shift in traffic to the new marketing page once the legacy page is retired.
Google Workspace's Release 1 is nearly complete; Release 2 is underway in development but not yet finished.